


Non Zero Sum

by lonelywalker



Category: VR.5
Genre: M/M, Post Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-19
Updated: 2011-04-19
Packaged: 2017-10-18 09:21:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/187362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lonelywalker/pseuds/lonelywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Post-series) Two basically straight men with nobody to hold on to and no one to trust but each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Non Zero Sum

Duncan is never entirely sure which time was the first time. It always seems, and has always seemed, as if he has already done it before: the tired meeting at the airport, the exchange of banal news, the drinks and return of well-worn banter, and then the hazy part he never tries too hard to remember.

He doesn’t bother to drive these days. Driving means licenses and taxes and being pulled over by the police, and Oliver disapproves of all of those things. It is far better to walk, or to take a bus, and to do everything slowly and carefully, making sure that no one is watching, that no one is following. Duncan suspects that he will always be an amateur at the spy game, partly because his training comes only from repeated study of _The Avengers_ , but mostly because he can never take it seriously. All the cloak-and-dagger stuff makes him laugh. It’s too sinister to be real. He takes it to heart once a year, though, when he finds flight numbers in his mailbox, and a scribbled note telling him to watch his back.

Oliver doesn’t change. Despite it all, despite hunting and hiding across continents, with few friends and fewer resources, he always somehow shows up in Arrivals looking just like Oliver Sampson. The first time, whenever that had been, Duncan had expected a beard, blond hair, a paper bag over his head, _something_. But instead there had been Oliver as he always had been, duffel bag hooked over the shoulder of an expensive suit, looking for all the world like he was on Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

And Duncan? Well, he’s changed a little. It’s warmer out here than it had been in Syd’s building. It’s quieter. He doesn’t have friends or computers, or even a phone. Picking up receivers makes him nervous these days. Anyway, there’s no one to call, and no one to call him.

They sit in the motel room and try to think of what to say. Oliver has already locked the door, checked the bathroom and closet for intruders, and swept the place for surveillance equipment. His searches, ever more tired and seemingly futile over the years, find nothing. Duncan has been renting the room under an assumed name for six months. It’s not exactly a busy town, and the staff seem happy enough with his claim to be a novelist struggling with writer’s block. Once, when this all started, and when he ceased to have a home, he had thought of really writing something down. But Oliver had disapproved, and that had ended that thought. Now he just makes certain that the maids see plenty of crumpled pages in the trash.

He’s made a bit of an effort to tidy up. His Raymond Chandler novels, scrounged from local secondhand bookstores, are stacked underneath the bed. His clothes – all t-shirts and shorts – have been flung into the closet. There’s really nothing else here. All of his personal items – everything of any nostalgic value – have been lost, and Oliver has warned him against acquiring anything new.

Oliver sits on the motel room’s only chair, and looks as if he needs a smoke. He has that jittery movement of his hands – not nervous, but impatient, as if sitting still is an unnecessary indulgence. “So,” he says, looking up at Duncan perched on the bed in front of him. “How are things?”

Duncan barely has time to say, “Fine” before the usual list of questions begins. They had managed to get to the motel from the airport without exchanging more than nods. Public conversation could be monitored, Oliver had assured him. Even the simple use of names in a greeting could be noted and remembered and used against them in the future. In a way the inquiries are reassuring. It gives them both something to do; something to stave off the inevitable.

Anything suspicious? Anyone following you? Anyone asking questions? Strange messages or mail? Contact with the outside world? Travel? Bills? Tax returns? Visits to the doctor or dentist? Duncan shakes his head after each one, and confirms it with a quiet “no”. There’s nothing that proves he even still exists, bar that yearly message in his mailbox, bar the man sitting in front of him now.

Eventually Oliver takes a deep, sighing breath, sits back, and closes his eyes. “I could do with that Scotch now, Duncan.”

“Sure. Course.” He takes a moment to just look at Oliver before getting up. It’s almost as if he hasn’t closed his eyes since that last time they met, and certainly not in front of anyone. Perhaps Duncan is the only person he knows who is very definitely not going to try to kill him.

The Scotch is in the closet, too. He bought it a few months ago, and let it sit unopened. Another precaution. Had anyone been watching him, they might have thought that he expected company then. He’s made no obvious preparations for Oliver’s visit this time around. Duncan picks it up, and with it two washed glasses. One of them he normally uses as a toothbrush holder, but this is a special occasion.

As he pours, as he always does, he has questions of his own. “Have you seen Dr. Bloom? Sam?”

Oliver gives a hint of a laugh, his head tipped back against the chair. “I’d tell you, but I’d have to kill you.”

Duncan wonders if that will ever be a joke. He wonders if it already is. “And Syd?”

Oliver’s eyes open, and he reaches out to take a glass. “She’s being looked after.”

So that’s that. He hadn’t expected anything different – not really. Oliver expends far too much energy keeping them all safe, travelling the world, most likely, covering all their tracks and blindsiding the Committee as far as he can. At the beginning, Duncan had some kind of idea as to the bigger picture. Now he only knows that, fifty-one weeks of the year, he is nobody and can never be anyone again.

It used to be there would be arguments now, with alcohol and despair fueling his anger. He would lose his temper, point out that there _is_ no point, that they’re all _nothing_ these days. They’re nothing without Sydney. And maybe that was how it started, the first time.

He had been living on the beach, in the days when he was still trying to convince himself that this kind of existence was temporary. Oliver had showed up, unexpectedly, and he had brought the Scotch that time. There had been no sophisticated mail drops then, and no set list of questions.

Now the whisky is familiar and reassuring against Duncan’s lips, and some kind of ease is restored to Oliver’s bearing. “I brought you some books,” Oliver says, casting a finger in the direction of his bag. He never really unpacks, because he’s never really staying. Without opening it, Duncan knows there will be nothing identifiable in it: clothes, toiletries, and little else. At least the books are something different.

He scrounges around underneath folded jeans and underwear, and finds two paperback crime novels, probably purchased at an airport. He can’t tell. The labels and price tags have been peeled away. They’re a little scruffy, too – dog-eared pages, rounded edges, stains of something he doesn’t want to identify. But they’re a gift, and they make him smile. “Thanks,” he says, and leaves them where they are, for now. He’ll have plenty of time to read them before Oliver returns. He’s had plenty of time to do a lot of things.

Once, Duncan had had a discussion with Dr. Bloom – Sydney’s father – when Joseph had been attempting to teach him how to play chess. Duncan had always lost, at the beginning. It was normal, he had thought. After all, Joseph was not only an adult, but also the smartest man Duncan had ever met. For some reason, Joseph had never seen it that way.

Over sodas in the garden on a summer afternoon, Joseph had told him about zero sum. In a zero sum game, such as chess, only one person could win. But Duncan – ever affable, ever diplomatic – had always found it difficult to dispense with his inner restraint and let loose his aggression. He was losing the games, Joseph had reasoned, because he was always playing for stalemate. “Don’t you want to win?” Joseph had asked, perhaps even letting a little frustration creep into his voice.

Duncan remembers shrugging; remembers telling him about karma, about the ideas that have always appealed to him more than the relentless alpha-male pursuit of victory. “Oh, Duncan,” Joseph had laughed, and mussed his hair. “If only there were more men like you in the world.” Duncan doubts that young Oliver Sampson would ever have had a similar conversation.

Oliver’s drink is almost gone, now. He soaks it up too easily, these days. Every time they do this, Duncan thinks that he must be hungry, that they should go for a meal. They never do. “Another?” he asks, his own glass still two-thirds full. This part could just as well be a script they’ve been rehearsing for years. Somehow it never becomes cliché.

“No,” Oliver says, putting his empty glass on the floor underneath the chair where it is less likely to be kicked over. His gaze, tired as it may be, is still the focused stare of that brooding Englishman who Duncan used to think was an enemy. Now they know each other far too well for hatred.

This is the awkward part. It always was; it always is. In idle moments, alone in bed, staring at a steadily-revolving ceiling fan, Duncan has imagined what he might say to make it easier in the future. There has to be some great romantic gesture, some killer line. But neither of them is truly after romance, and if it were about sex it would be much more simple. Duncan can never really convince himself that it’s not about the sex, despite the fact that… Well, the truth is there are no facts anymore. He’s given up asking.

Oliver gets up, checks the door again. It’s locked, but that’s hardly a guarantee. Duncan is almost certain there’s a gun in that bag, but Oliver doesn’t go searching for it. He will later.

They leave the light on. It would be a sorry kind of denial, switching it off. Neither one of them is Syd, even in the darkness. Neither one of them is anything but Oliver or Duncan, and perhaps they are even less than that now. Duncan meant to ask once if Oliver had ever been with a man before, but the moment had been lost, and soon afterward he had realized that he didn’t need to know.

This time, like the time Duncan assumes was the first time, Oliver comes to a halt, standing in front of him, impassive and weary. He lets out another breath, as if steeling himself, and reaches out a hand to grip Duncan’s shoulder. Maybe it would all be easier without the kissing. It’s all too obvious who they are in those snatched moments of intimacy – the smell of cologne, the scratch of stubble, the taste of something once strange that has now become an addiction.

Duncan reaches out blindly for Oliver’s shirt, feeling tense, lean muscle beneath his fingers as he pulls the material free from belted trousers. Oliver’s lost weight. He thinks that every year. He’s never figured out whether he’s comparing each time to the last time, or to the man he used to be, back when they were much less than close. Oliver’s hands are smoothing out his hair as Duncan slips hands up underneath that shirt, searching out an old wound he remembers from when it was still bleeding. Oliver makes a noise, a hollow moan, when he slides one of his fingers into the gap made by a scar. It’s a memory of pain.

Oliver falls with him onto the bed, with no energy to resist, and an irresistible urge to continue. It’s a validation, discovering the scars. It’s the one remnant of an old life neither of them can leave behind. Sometimes, in the shower, Duncan counts up his own old injuries. They’re nothing spectacular – a fumbled knife; singed fingertips; a grazed knee from falling off a bike in Syd’s driveway – but they count. They tell him that something existed before this.

Under Oliver’s shirt is the evidence of far more recent violence, however. When the buttons are undone, and the shirt folded back, there are vivid black and yellow bruises patterning his ribs above the old bullet wound. Duncan’s fingers trace them, applying no pressure, and swallowing the first two questions it would normally have occurred to him to ask: who did this? Have you seen a doctor? Oliver pushes his hand away.

In the beginning they hadn’t talked at all. One shocked whisper, one murmur of confusion, would have ended it then, and they both needed it too badly to give into the kind of things they might say, were they with anyone else. Duncan still isn’t sure that he’s really doing it correctly. He still isn’t sure what feels good, and what might feel better if they could just communicate. They’ve only done this… what, five or six times in as many years? It’s still a surprise, and a relief, to find himself hard inside light shorts that can easily be pulled down past his hips. So he can still do it. He’s not going to fail at this, at least.

Oliver has positioned himself, lying flat on the bed, pillows underneath his head and shoulders. Undoing his belt is an effort undertaken with closed eyes, and Duncan can see the tension in his body. There’s another scar on his back, Duncan knows, and many more subtle suggestions of the violence he’s seen over a lifetime of danger. Duncan kicks away still-tied sneakers, and kneels, naked now, on the edge of the bed. He reaches out a hand to touch the other man’s chest, far from the bruises.

“Oliver,” he says, and he knows that, with one word, he may have ended it for both of them forever.

None of this is supposed to be real. They’re both very used to subconscious journeys into virtual reality, only faintly remembered, with little effect on the outside world. But Oliver stares at him with those green-brown eyes that are – that have always been – so very genuine. “Come here, Duncan.”

This feels like the first time he’s ever been kissed – the first time it has really been them, alive and whole and together. Letting himself fall into Oliver’s arms, Duncan wonders if it will be the last time. There will be too much to deny, after this, and too much to push away. Duncan’s always remembered their yearly encounters, just has he had his excursions into VR. Maybe now Oliver will remember, too. It would only be fitting if he were as disconcerted by this as he used to be in that other virtual reality of theirs.

Duncan’s hand searches down past Oliver’s now undone belt, and feels the erection swelling there, hot and responsive to his touch. Oliver makes a noise that might be a laugh, and shifts his hips. “Be gentle,” he says. Even though he’s most likely being sarcastic, Duncan takes it as permission.

He pulls down Oliver’s trousers and briefs, taking care in case he hasn’t seen the full extent of his injuries. Oliver had been able to walk without any trouble, but then Oliver had been able to walk with a gaping hole in his side once upon a time. It’s better to be careful. Duncan lays his hand against Oliver’s inner thigh, and imagines he can feel blood pulsing there, just beneath his fingertips.

“I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do,” he says, and it’s another forbidden phrase. But since they are Oliver and Duncan now, and not those ill-defined figures of years before, he might as well try a little honesty. It’s another one of those zero sum games he doesn’t care enough about to win.

Oliver reaches out and takes his hand. His grip is tight, and reassuringly real. “We’ll figure it out,” he says.

It’s long after dawn by the time Duncan finds himself awake, still in bed, and half-covered by a sheet. He doesn’t remember it all immediately – just that faint disconcerting sense that something is different. He’s still naked, and his body is damp with sweat. His right arm protests, and he pulls on it, encountering resistance. It’s only when he blinks his eyes to clear the fog, and rolls over that he finds Oliver looking back at him.

Maybe Oliver had been sleeping with his head on Duncan’s arm; had been woken up when Duncan jerked it away. As Duncan shakes his hand, trying to restore circulation, he wonders what that means, if it means anything.

“I’m going with you,” he says, and he surprises himself with the words. It’s as if he’s given voice to the thought of another man – the man he was last night, before they had fallen asleep.

“You can’t.” Oliver still sounds tired, but not in the all-consuming, soul-deadening way he had before. “It’s not safe.”

Duncan reaches out his hand to touch Oliver under the sheets, to feel his sweat and his hair and the life of him. It still surprises him when Oliver doesn’t flinch. “It’s not about safe anymore. This isn’t a zero sum game.”

There’s a pause, and then Oliver raises his eyebrows. “You sound just like Sydney’s father.”

Duncan grins. At least it isn’t another rejection. “He told me once that you can’t win by playing for a draw. You can’t even get a _draw_ by playing for a draw, and that’s what we’ve been doing. We need to change.”

“It’s not safe,” Oliver repeats, but his words sound less like an order than they usually do. He clears his throat. “We all win together, is that it? Or die together.” Duncan kisses him again, something he’s never done before in the clear light of morning, and Oliver takes in a long breath. “I don’t know what this is, Duncan. I don’t…”

Duncan shrugs. “Welcome to the game, Oliver Sampson.” He’s waited years to say that. He’s glad he didn’t have to wait any longer.

In the future, when he tries to remember which time was the first, he knows that this is the story he’ll tell.


End file.
